Packet-based communication according to the internet protocol (IP) is used for a wide variety of telecommunication applications. In many telecommunication applications, audio coding is used along with video coding in order to provide multimedia (i.e., audio-video) content that can be communicated between devices. Examples of applications that code audio and video information include video telephony (VT), video conferencing, and streaming video applications, to name a few. The audio and video information may be segmented into frames or packets, which comprise blocks of audio and video data. The information can be encoded, and then transmitted from an encoding device to a decoding device via packet-based IP communication. The decoding device decodes and assembles the audio and video information to create audio and video output.
In many network protocols, time stamps are used with the audio and video information in order to allow for synchronization of the information at the decoding device. In VT applications, for example, the video information may be synchronized with the audio information at the decoding device in order to ensure that the audio and video information is presented to the user in unison. As one example, it is desirable that audible speech be synchronized to movement of a speaker's mouth. Likewise, it may be intended that particular video content be viewed in conjunction with specific audio. In some specifications, such as 3GPP TS26.114 (the third generation partnership project technical specification 26.114), signaling is provisioned to allow disabling of multi-media synchronization altogether. In this case, audio information and video information are not synchronized for any communication between devices, e.g., the audio and video synchronization is disabled in both directions of a bi-directional communication.